Medivh and Sonya reworks arrive with the latest Heroes patch notes

Heroes of the Storm released its latest patch to live servers today and it includes the reworks for Sonya and Medivh, as well as some tuning for Ana. Ana’s a curious case that will likely need some time on live servers before players really understand how the change will impact her gameplay overall, but it seems like a solid nerf. She’s received a small amount of self-healing on Shrike, which should help her self-sustain, but has received a few nerfs or changes in other areas. Her Biotic Grenade heals for less, but applies its healing buff longer. Her Healing Dart has also been nerfed, as have a number of her talents. Additional self-sustain is unlikely to overcome all of those changes.

As for Sonya and Medivh, they’ll take some time to assess, too. Sonya’s rework in particular was aimed at giving her more viable talent options, but initial impressions from the PTR suggest a Slam-oriented build is still the least viable option, as has always been the case. However, Sonya was also suffering from a bug on the PTR that reduced how much Fury she had to work with; a Slam-oriented build might play out very differently when she has more Fury to spent on spamming Slams.

The amplified healing effect of Biotic Grenade now works on all healing

Piercing Darts [E]

1st quest unlock

Range increase from 50 to 25%

2nd quest unlock

Range increase from 50 to 25%

Detachable Box Magazine (Passive)

1st quest unlock

New functionality

The self-healing for Shrike now also applies to non-Heroes

Level 4

Aim Down Sights (Trait)

Shrike activation cooldown reduced from 10 to 3 seconds

Air Strike [W]

Airborne duration reduced from 4 to 3 seconds

Level 7

Debilitating Dart (Active)

Cooldown reduced from 45 to 20 seconds

Mind-Numbing Agent (Trait)

Spell Power reduction per Shrike stack decreased from 15% to 10%

Developer Comment:While Ana’s current win-rate is sitting above most other Healers, and North of 50%, we have made some changes to make her feel more meaningful in solo-Support compositions. Along with the addition to self-sustain through Shrike, we also took the opportunity to do some Talent balancing as well. While there are no major outliers in terms of win-rate, she definitely has some Talents that are overshadowing others in terms of pick-rates. We have tried to address the majority of these to hopefully open up some new strategic choices for Ana players. We really enjoyed the changes internally, and we’re excited to see what players can do with them.

Warrior

Sonya

Sonya has received significant updates with today’s patch. Find her detailed changes below, and then head to the Sonya and Medivh Gameplay Updates blog for more insight behind these changes.

Talents

Level 1

Block (Passive)

Removed

Furious Blow [W]

Moved from Level 16

New functionality

Every fourth Seismic Slam deals 40% more damage and costs no Fury

New Talent: Tough as Nails (Passive)

Every 12 seconds gain a stack of Block that grants 75 Physical Armor against the next Hero Basic Attack. Stores up to 3 charges. Cooldown refreshes 200% faster while Fury is active

One major difference between the PTR patch notes and the live patch notes is a change to Samuro. On the PTR, Blizzard removed the ability for him to switch places with a clone back at the Hall of Storms, but they reconsidered before this patch went live. Clone-swapping with a Samuro at your base is a pretty slick trick, and sort of the ultimate escape from a deadly situation if you can pull it off. It isn’t something easily done, so leaving it in the game lets Samuro maintain a certain level of mastery to play him really, really well. Using mind games to escape from tight spots is his thing.